Synergetics and Fullerenes

New Landscape in Art and Science

Figure: Synergetics I, published in 1975

Buckminster Fuller, USA 1895

Although Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was never an architect, his work had a profound impact on the profession for most of his life because of his inventive and futurist ideas. His inventions were achieved by scientific research applied to design. As an author and co-author to more than 50 books, he advocated the creation of a world design science to avert ecological catastrophe and promote resource conservation, notions that were a generation ahead of their time.30 He developed numerous inventions and concepts, which impacted the world of architecture and science. Fuller was the first pioneer of prefabricated housing to understand that cost-effectiveness in this field depended entirely on a drastic reduction in the weight of the product. His 1929 project for a steel, duralumin and plastic “Dymaxion House” was for years illustrated in newspapers and magazines as the prototype for the mass-production dwelling of the future.31 Fuller developed the concept of cumulative technical advantage called ‘synergy’, and it was also him who named the whole evolutionary process which it is part of as ‘ephemeralization’. The given definition of ‘synergy’ means the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts in isolation.32 He observes the behavior of entire or whole aggregate systems, which is independent of the behavior of any of their subcomponents, if taken separately from their whole. For him, the idea that the intractable limitations of nature would yield, one by one, to the power of the human mind, explained and justified the transformation of the 18th century craftsman’s priceless timepiece into the 20th century mass produced quartz watch. The studies of energy and sinergy are accomplices, but their differentiation lies in their relationship to the subfunctions of nature. Energy studies objects isolated from their whole complex, while synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature’s galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.33 Along these concept s he developed a vectorial geometrical system, based on a tetrahedron unit combined with octahedrons called ‘Energetic-Synergetic Geometry’, a form that generated an economic space-filling structure which led him to design the geodesic dome. Fuller was particularly interested in this dome structure because of the strength it had relative to its weight, and its large volume within a small surface area. He developed, popularized, and envisioned it in all types of structures such as houses or museums, and eventually received the U.S. patent for it.

Within the realm of chemistry, the serendipitous discovery of a third allotropic form in 1985, uncovered a fundamentally different structure of closed carbon cages, which were to become known as Fullerenes. The C60 model of the new molecule resembled the geodesic dome, with 60 points joining pentagons and hexagons. The stability of the Fullerene molecule was sourced by geodesic and electronic bonding factors, a closed cage structure. This new family of non-planar carbon compounds has generated immense interest within the scientific community in such a short period of time, with thousands of papers published about Fullerenes and Fullerene-based materials to date.